The latest events ...
You can find some of the latest events around the club here.
Lecture on digital antenna rotors
During the local chapter evening in March 2023, Klaus (DL5RFK) gave a talk on digital antenna rotors. He talked about the motivation to digitize the rotors on our club station. For example, there is a desire to be able to control all rotors on the club station from all radio seats. So far, this is only possible at the table where the respective control unit is located. The control should still be possible at a box via hardware buttons, but in the future it should also work via software on the PC, for example directly from the logging software Wintest. This works, for example, with GS-232 commands, as suggested by Yeasu.
The project for this had already been started last year together with some members of the local chapter after the rotor for the 10-meter Yagi antenna had been disassembled and repaired in May 2022. An already existing hardware of RemoteQTH served as starting point for the control, this is based on an Ardiuno chip. In the beginning the firmware of YO3RAK was used, then an extended version of ON7EQ was tried. In the meantime, an own DL0DX fork of the software was created on Github and already own adjustments and extensions were made.
Klaus (DL5RFK) gave a talk at the local chapter evening. (Photo: Andreas, DC4AB)
During the twenty minute talk Klaus showed some photos of the self-developed test boards and summarized the state of progress for the attendees.